Abstract
Since the beginning of the 1970s when urgent countermeasures against heavy environmental pollution were required, investigation of the lower atmosphere with local air pollution has made a great progress. On the first stage of this period, the photochemical air pollution became the main subject in environmental issues, which had a mesoscale structure unable to understand as pollutant diffusion/ transport from individual pollutant sources, and the role of local meteorological phenomena was focused on. During the same period, mesoscale meteorological models evolved to give realistic simulations of air pollution structure, especially when used with photochemical reaction models. On this background, detailed structures and mechanisms of important meteorological phenomena and coupled air pollutions have been clarified. An outline of the research is described here, with a greater weight on observational aspect. Main topics are land and sea breezes, extended local wind system, urban heat island effect related with locally formed high concentrations of ozone, and cold air lakes and local fronts typically formed on the Kanto plain related with high concentrations of particulate matter.
An attention should be paid to the fact that currently climate change, although it is not always definite whether global or local, is superposed on and interacts with year-to-year changes in local meteorology and air pollution.
